Coronavirus rules are important – but we should cut Nicola Sturgeon some slack

Of course ignorance or absent-mindedness isn’t a legal defence, but this is not on the same level as the decision made by Dominic Cummings

Nicola Sturgeon has apologised for her mistake (Getty Images)

I'm not a fan of Nicola Sturgeon. It isn’t, I believe, because she is a powerful woman, because I didn’t feel the same about Theresa May or now about Arlene Foster, still less the likes of Angela Merkel, the only political leader worth the name in Europe.

No, it’s the studied air of responsibility, the peculiar Majoresque bureaucratese she speaks in, and the disingenuous way she pretends that all this is nothing to do with the campaign for independence and looking better than Boris Johnson in London. 

The reality is that Scotland’s record on Covid-19 isn’t much better than England’s, though her achievement is to make it feel as though it is.

Yet I don’t really think she ought to quit in shame because she forgot to put her mask on at a wake. Characteristically she cleverly overstated her own offence as a “mistake” and a stupid one, and declared that she wasn’t going to make any excuses (although of course she just did). That way she leaves little room for her persecutors to claim she is shrugging it off or trying to redefine her own rules.

Elsewhere she’s reportedly let it be known that it was a “little lapse in concentration” which sounds plausible at any rate. As a conscientious mask wearer I realised the other week that I’d spent 10 minutes chatting to someone indoors and forgotten to move my mask from chin to snout, and I felt a bit stupid too. I imagine that it is a common enough failing, especially for those of us who wear glasses and get steamed up when we put our face covering on.

It seems obvious that this is a long way from the Dominic Cummings case, when the rules were consciously considered and set aside because driving from London to Durham was what any responsible father would do (or words to that effect).

 Or when Sturgeon’s chief medical officer took herself and her child off to check on her second home during the first lockdown. Or when Kay Burley appeared to game the rules on her night out with friends.

Of course ignorance or absent-mindedness isn’t a legal defence. If you’re distracted on the motorway driving to a funeral and you get a speeding ticket, then you’ll have to pay up. If you were being harsh you’d apply the same logic to Sturgeon’s offence. More realistically you’d let her off with a caution in the circumstances, maybe giving her the benefit of the doubt.

She seems as keen to obey her own structures as she is to impose them on others. In any case, as I say, I’d be quite happy to see her quit for a good reason or because she’s lost the upcoming election (no hope of that), but not about “maskgate” or whatever we’re going to call this non-scandal. 

The outrage is entirely confected by her political enemies, and it’s ridiculous.